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Six Degrees of Separation

Six Degrees of Separation is a brilliant new book meme
thought up by Emma Chapman and Annabel Smith. On the first Saturday of the
month we all get to think and blog about where our reading journeys take us.
Check out Emma’s blog here for her post about Six Degrees.

This month’s starting book is Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites, and here’s my book chain…

Start: Burial Rites

This is next to read on my pile of Bailey’s longlist books.
I know it’s set in Iceland, which conjures up images of a cold and alien
landscape, leading me to…

1: Cold Earth by
Sarah Moss

Set in Greenland, an archaeological dig takes a sinister
turn as plague threatens to decimate the outside world.

2. Doomsday Book
by Connie Willis

I love a plague-ridden book and Willis’ time-travelling
adventure drops a PhD student in 1348. What could go wrong?

3. The Decameron
by Giovanni Boccaccio

If the need to hide from the Black Death presents itself you
can at least console yourself with Boccaccio’s amusing and often bawdy stories.
Life in the Florentine countryside has never been so much fun.

4. The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant

Ah, Florence, city of my heart. Dunant’s story weaves art
and passion and religion in a luscious tale, featuring one of my archenemies
Savonarola.

5. Wolf Hall by
Hilary Mantel

Speaking of archenemies, Mantel gave another of mine a more
human mien in Wolf Hall. Oh, and
truly brought something fresh to historical fiction and my historical buddies
the Tudors.

6. So now I’m with the Tudors I want to stay awhile, but
which story to choose? I agonised for a moment or two before plumping for The Autobiography of Henry VIII with notes
by his Fool Will Somers by Margaret George.

I love this book as my battered and tattered copy attests.
I’ve read it many times just for the sheer joy of it.

And that’s my journey from nineteenth-century Iceland to
sixteenth-century England, via Greenland, Renaissance Florence, plague, and the
odd bête noire. Just the way I like it!

Join in on Twitter with #6degrees

Next month’s starting book is Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. I already have a few books
in mind.

The story of Lizzie Borden has a whiff of folklore about it, it feels hazy to me, apocryphal perhaps, something half known and uncertain like Washington and the cherry tree or the ride of Paul Revere. Shamefully, I had to Google both the latter two examples to double check they were the events I thought I was referring to. I choose them deliberately though - is it my Englishness that makes these events fuzzy to me? Do these stories live in the American psyche the way Magna Carta, Henry VIII and his six wives, and Jack the Ripper (to select three almost at random) live in mine?
I remember a book we stocked when I was a very young bookseller at Waterstones in Watford that looked at the psychology of children who murder their parents. The copy on the back of the book talked of Lizzie Borden. I remember half wondering about the case, then shelving the book away and moving onto the next armful. But it stuck in my m…

My nieces and nephews and I have a monthly book club, called Book Chase (although it sometimes gains an extra 's' to become Book Chasse). The rules are simple: we all bring something we've read during the last month, talk about it to each other, and eat snacks. We live tweet each meeting with the hashtag BookChase. Sometimes, when we remember, we Storify all the tweets too. This month, we remembered!